Mudge&Chen SociologyOfParties

SO40CH14-MudgeChen ARI 15 April 2014 14:10
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Political Parties and the
Sociological Imagination:
Past, Present, and Future
Directions
Stephanie L. Mudge
1
and Anthony S. Chen
2
1
Department of Sociology, University of California, Davis, California 95616;
email: mudge@ucdavis.edu
2
Department of Sociology, Department of Political Science, Northwestern University,
Evanston, Illinois 60208; email: anthony-chen@northwestern.edu
Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2014. 40:14.114.26
The Annual Review of Sociology is online at
soc.annualreviews.org
This articles doi:
10.1146/annurev-soc-071312-145632
Copyright c 2014 by Annual Reviews.
All rights reserved
Keywords
political parties, political sociology, democracy, representation
Abstract
The classical sociology of parties was born alongside parties themselves.
It explored their dynamic interrelationships with states and society, as
well as the tensions inherent in the fact that parties are simultaneously
representatives and power seekers. Despite these rich foundations, from
the 1960s the sociological approach came to be narrowly identied with
a one-dimensional conception of parties, and political sociologists fo-
cused their attention elsewhere. This review contributes to efforts that
began in the 1990s to reclaim the political party as a full-edged soci-
ological object. To this end, we track the hourglass-shaped trajectory
of the sociology of parties: from broad Marxian and Weberian roots,
to narrowing and near-eclipse after the 1960s, to a reemergence that
reclaims the breadth of the classical traditions. We conclude by suggest-
ing six lines of inquiry that we believe would be fruitful, emphasizing
both classical concerns that deserve more attention and innovative ap-
proaches that point in novel directions.
14.1
Review in Advance first posted online
on April 24, 2014. (Changes may
still occur before final publication
online and in print.)
Changes may still occur before final publication online and in print
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INTRODUCTION
Long in the making, the rise of party politics
was among the most striking phenomena of the
past century. Recognizable political parties rst
emerged during the late-seventeenth century
(or earlier
1
) and then proliferated in ts and
starts alongside the advance of democratization,
industrialization, and liberalism. Institutional-
izing in many countries during a global wave
of efforts at building constitutional republics
between 1848 and 1918, stable party systems
remained a relative rarity beyond the West
into the mid-1900s (Goldstone 2004, p. 334;
Dahl 1966). Then, as the twentieth century
drew to a close, third-wave democratizations
raised the proportion of democratic countries
from 30% to 60%, spanning Latin America,
East Asia, the Pacic, and the former Soviet
bloc, as well as South Asia, central Asia, and
sub-Saharan Africa (Huntington 1991, Markoff
1996, Przeworski et al. 2000, Simmons et al.
2006; but see Carothers 2002). Ongoing events
since the Arab Spring in 2011 have raised the
possibility of parties institutionalization in the
Middle East and North Africathat is, areas
that have long been exceptions to the spread of
representative democracyat the same time
that they have reminded observers of the dif-
culties of stabilizing party-based democratic
competition (Ibrahim 1993, Posusney 2002).
And yet, despite Schattschneiders oft-
quoted observationnowmore apt thanever
that democracy is unthinkable save in terms of
parties, political sociology has long been read-
ily thinkable without parties (Schattschneider
1942, p. 1). For much of the last 50 years, po-
litical sociologists largely abandoned the study
of parties to political scientists (cf. De Leon
et al. 2009, De Leon 2014). The Annual Re-
view of Political Science, for instance, has pub-
lished nearly three times as many articles as
the Annual Review of Sociology that are explic-
1
Following Machiavelli, Weber considered the Italian op-
position between the Guelphs and Ghibellines in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries to be a party opposition (Machiavelli
1532 [1998], Weber 1919 [1958]).
itly concerned with political parties as objects of
analysis.
Parties low prole in political sociology
is all the more surprising given that modern
party systems and the sociology of parties were
twins at birth. The late-nineteenth-century
institutionalization of Western party systems
also witnessed the genesis of the social sciences
and the classical sociology of parties. Taking
a particular interest in emergent socialist and
workers parties, classical thinkersMarx and
Weber central among themlocated parties at
the center of political life and social scientic
analysis (Marx & Engels 1848 [1978]; Lenin
1902 [1999]; Ward 1908; Michels 1911 [1962];
Weber 1914 [1978], 1919 [1958]; Gramsci
19291935 [1971]; on the proliferation of
socialist parties from the 1860s, see Eley 2002).
The Marxian and Weberian traditions agreed
that parties were indigenous to industrialized
capitalism and oriented toward state control
but, whereas Marxian thinkers situated the
party as an ideologically laden nexus of theory
and practice and equated party oppositions
with class oppositions, Weberians understood
parties as both class- and status-based organi-
zations that, regardless of origins or principles,
tended to rationalize around the basic goal of
power seeking. In either case, classical thinking
on the political party offered a broad and
multidimensional perspective that attended to
its dynamic interrelationships with states and
society and to how those interrelationships
rendered parties the bearers of more or less
representative forms of authority.
By the 1960s, sociology was a leading voice
in the social science of parties, but the sociolog-
ical approach was also coming to be narrowly
identied with a one-dimensional understand-
ing of parties as expressions of social groups
a view closely associated with Paul Lazarsfeld,
Seymour Martin Lipset, and their colleagues.
While this narrow interpretation was never a
fair treatment of their nuanced work or its
classical bases, and it ignored a range of so-
ciologically informed works on party organi-
zation and party systems, the sociological ap-
proach gave way to an increasingly dominant
14.2 Mudge
Chen
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political science of parties that focused on more
individualistic, and eventually rational choice
dominated, modes of analysis. In the 1970s
and 1980s, many political sociologists turned
their attention away from parties and toward
states and social movements, even as students
of politics arguedthird-wave democratization
notwithstandingthat the age of parties was on
the wane. The rich traditions of the sociology
of parties appeared to be in danger of eclipse.
However, an incipient scholarship emerging
since the 1990s has signaled an impulse to re-
newthe sociology of parties, mobilizing a wider
eld of analytical vision that is reminiscent of
classical traditions. While some sociologists and
political scientists have revisited the sociologi-
cal approach, other scholarship has resituated
political parties as interconnected with states
and society and renewed questions of represen-
tation. This emerging scholarship goes beyond
the classical sociology of parties in important
ways, including incorporating a sensitivity to
causal processes as they unfold in time as well as
the performative and symbolic aspects of party
politics. It thus holds signicant promise for the
partys overdue resuscitation as a full-edged
sociological object.
Our review seeks to contribute to the ef-
fort by tracking the sociology of parties past,
present, and possible futures. The discussion
is organized into four sections. Because a cen-
tral aim is to connect the past and present of
the sociology of parties, in the next section
we devote some effort to classical perspectives,
dealing with an admittedly narrow selection of
thinkers from the Marxian and Weberian tra-
ditions. By highlighting classical thinkers at-
tentiveness to dynamic society-party-state in-
terrelationships and to important questions of
representation, organization, and power seek-
ing, we aim to convey, as concisely as possible,
a clear sense of the depthandbreadthof classical
thinking on parties. We then deal briey with
the subelds mid-century high-water mark, the
narrowing it entailed, and its subsequent de-
cline. A third section focuses on sociological
renewals, discussing a range of scholarshipsince
the 1990s and zeroing in on works in which po-
litical parties are central objects of inquiry, re-
gardless of where they t into the analysis. We
alsodiscuss a recent sociological turninpolitical
science among students of American politics in-
terestedinparties. By necessity, inthe latter two
sections we are (again) selective, largely omit-
ting work that deals with party systems rather
than parties themselves, focusing on English-
language scholarship, and touching lightly on
the voluminous European comparative politics
literature. The fourth and nal section high-
lights what we think is new about the resurgent
party literature alongside classical themes that
deserve more attention, outlining six promis-
ing lines of inquiry that a renewed sociology of
parties might yet pursue.
PARTIES IN THE CLASSICAL
IMAGINATION
Parties gured prominently in early politi-
cal and sociological thought, especially in the
Marxian and Weberian traditions.
2
Notable for
their scope, the Marxian and Weberian tradi-
tions situated parties as dynamically intercon-
nected with states and society and as forces
in their own right, articulating in the process
important questions about parties as organiza-
tions, power seekers, and representative agents.
One set of basic concerns dealt with parties
social bases. Differing in their opinions about
the kinds of groups parties represent, classi-
cal perspectives situated parties as reections
of the multiple social cleavages that characterize
modern, industrializedsocieties. Inthe Marxian
case, the effort to showthat political parties are
the more or less adequate political expression
of. . .classes and fractions of classes was central
to historical materialist method because party
struggles could thus be analyzed as class strug-
gles (Engels 1895 [1978]). As opposed to the
2
A fuller discussion of classical thinking on parties might
range, roughly, from Machiavellis (1532 [1998]) The Prince
to Gramscis (19291935 [1971]) Prison Notebooks, covering
many overlapping strands of philosophical, political, and so-
cial scientic thought in between. The following thus repre-
sents an extremely selective discussion.
www.annualreviews.org Political Parties and the Sociological Imagination 14.3
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conservative parties of the aristocracy or liberal
parties of the industrial bourgeoisie, the social-
ist mass party (or, often, anidealizedcommunist
party) received pride of place in Marxian schol-
arship as an inherently progressive organiza-
tion and natural class representative, capable of
rendering the industrial proletariat stronger,
rmer, mightier, andincreasingly able toeffect
change (Marx & Engels 1848 [1978], p. 481).
Weber then modied the Marxian class-
centric view of parties with his famous distinc-
tion between classes and status groups: Par-
ties could be based in either class or status and
are rarely pure reections of one or the other
(Weber 1914 [1958], p. 194). Differing Marx-
ian and Weberian conceptions of parties social
bases lent themselves to distinctive modes of
historical analysis: Whereas the Marxian con-
ception of parties as vectors of class forma-
tion, antagonism, and alliance produced im-
portant analyses of revolutionary change (Marx
1850 [1978], 1852 [1978]; Engels 1895 [1978]),
Webers more uid conceptionof parties social
bases lent itself to the analysis of change within
parties themselves. Echoing Ostrogorski, for
instance, Weber tracked parties move from
plutocratic status bases to more class-based
plebiscitarian (mass) forms over time (Weber
1919 [1958], pp. 100101; Ostrogorski 1902
[1981], 1902 [1982]).
3
Recognition of parties as seekers of power
(in the most general sense
4
) fed into another
set of historical questions, moving from the is-
sue of parties social bases to the question of
their relationship to states. Weber, in partic-
ular, emphasized state-party ties.
5
Often orig-
inating as illegal or extralegal organizations,
3
Noting the growing inuence of legal and political pro-
fessionals, Weber arguably saw the modern party as moving
toward newstatus bases in time (Weber 1919 [1958] , pp. 94
95).
4
Party action is oriented toward the acquisition of social
power, that is to say, toward inuencing social action no mat-
ter what its content may be (Weber 1911 [1978], p. 938).
5
These differences in emphasis can be understood as effects
of Gramscis and Webers different historical, political, and
geographical positioning, but a full discussion is beyond the
scope of this review.
parties for Weber were bases of countervail-
ing, nonstate authority that evolved alongside
the modern state and accelerated its consoli-
dation; like the modern state, parties author-
ity bases were predominantly of a rational-legal
sort, but Weber highlighted that, as organiza-
tions like any other, they may also be charis-
matic or traditional. Whatever their authority
bases, parties shape state ofcialdom directly
particularly in parliamentary systemsby fash-
ioning themselves as cabinets-in-waiting and
then using nominations and appointments to
create a stratum of state ofcials who are eval-
uated according to political rather than tech-
nocratic criteria, whose rst loyalties are party
loyalties, and who work to extend party con-
trol deep into technocratic ranks (Weber 1914
[1978], p. 294; 1919 [1958], pp. 8795). For bet-
ter or worse, parties and states are thus dynam-
ically interconnected: Parties shape state com-
position, diversify forms of authority, and insert
partisan interests into the otherwise rational-
legal arenas of modern politics.
Marxian thinkers, meanwhile, were espe-
cially concerned with party-society ties, em-
phasizing the processes by which parties both
channel interests and act back on society. This
does not mean that they were unconcerned with
parties relationships to the state; Gramsci, for
instance, described the party as a state in ges-
tation and described the whole of his political
writings as an analysis of the political party,
in its relations with the classes and the State
(Gramsci 19291935 [1971], p. 123). An im-
plication is that the careful analysis of party-
society ties is a precondition for understand-
ing how the state develops, or might develop.
Whereas for Weber modern parties could be
understood with reference to two ideal types
the patronage party and the ideological party
(Weber 1917 [1978], pp. 139798)parties in
the Marxian tradition are always dual entities, at
once vehicles for class advancement and semi-
autonomous sites of theoretical development.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels
famously argued that the communist party was
a means of the proletariats political and gen-
eral education (Marx & Engels 1848 [1978],
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p. 481). For Lenin, the vanguard party be-
came a mover of history by marrying political
action to the theoretical articulation of work-
ers aims, bringing philosophical light to their
movements (Lenin 1895 [1972], 1902 [1999]).
Gramsci later emphasized that parties need not
advance the hegemonic project of the working
classes per se, but they are indeed carriers of
hegemonic struggles between and within social
groups (Anderson 1976b). Social groupness it-
self is a party effect, however: Politically signif-
icant social blocs are constituted by parties, and
not vice versa. In Gramscis words, The masses
dont exist politically, if they are not framed
in political parties (Gramsci 1921 [2008]; see
also Gramsci 19291935 [1971], Paggi 1979,
Hawley 1980). For Gramsci, parties dis- and
rearticulate social groups partly by producing
organic intellectuals who foster class alliances
and cultivate the good sense of the masses
(Gramsci 19291935 [1971], pp. 523, 3031,
168, 340; Molyneux 1978 [2008]). Political par-
ties are thus central to the unity of theory and
practice that is at the heart of Marxism (Marx
1845 [1978]; see also Anderson 1976a).
Differential emphases on party-society ver-
sus party-state ties in the Marxian and Webe-
rian traditions, respectively, ultimately led to
different conclusions on important questions
of representation and the trajectory of political
power struggles. Are parties driven by the pri-
orities of a select few or are they channels for
expressing the interests of those they purport
to represent? To what extent, and under what
conditions, do parties impose an ideology on
electoral publics, versus facilitating their self-
expression and orienting them toward collec-
tively benecial ends? Are they a means to rev-
olutionary transformation, or simply a means
to state power? In the Weberian tradition, ra-
tionalization around power seeking is a basic
tendency of the political party: Parties close
themselves off and marry themselves to states,
tending to become less and less representative
of the mass public and part of an essentially con-
servative bureaucratic apparatus. For thinkers
in the Marxian tradition, however, rationaliza-
tion around power seeking is probable, but not
inevitable; the truly progressive party stays an-
chored to civil society, constitutes social groups
by articulating their shared interests, and then
channels and orients those interests in transfor-
mative ways.
6
Weber emphasized that, once in ofce, the
elected representative can make his own de-
cisions, being obligated only to express his
own genuine conviction (Weber 1914 [1978],
p. 293). Parliamentary politics are party-led,
and citizens are largely politically passive
consumers of programs and agendas (Weber
1914 [1978], p. 294). On what bases par-
ties led, however, was a different issue: The
modern party was increasingly built on legal-
rational authority, but parties also made room
for claims to authority on the basis of spe-
cial insight, knowledge, or talent (that is,
charisma). Here, still, Weberand more fa-
mously, Robert Michelsheld out little hope.
Attracted to states as a means of stable nanc-
ing, legal protections, and administrative re-
sources, the party tends to extract itself from
civil society and merge into the state until its
bureaucratic organization. . .denitively gains
the upper hand over its soul (Michels 1911
[1962], p. 358).
7
Because all parties live in
a house of power, there is no exception to
this tendency (Weber 1914 [1958], p. 194;
1917 [1978], pp. 139599; Michels 1911 [1962];
for a discussion of points of disagreement be-
tween Weber and Michels, see Roth 1978,
p. xcii). Parties thus introduce a paradox at
the heart of democratic societies, tending to
lead rather than represent and to bring forth
the rule of professional politicians without a
calling, without the inner charismatic quali-
ties that make a leader (Weber 1919 [1958],
pp. 87, 113). For Michels, basic democratic
processescompetition, mass appeals, party-
state interaction, delegationall tended to
6
Needless to say, regressive parties may also be articulators of
social groups and agents of hegemonic projects, but exactly
whose interests are served is a more open question.
7
Weber placed particular emphasis on the means by which
parties are nanced as a determinant of the distribution of po-
litical power and of party policy (Weber 1914 [1978], p. 286).
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render parties vulnerable to the iron lawof oli-
garchy (Michels 1911 [1962], pp. 70, 33037,
365).
8
Some thinkers in the Marxian tradition,
meanwhile, understood the tension between
representation and power seeking as poten-
tially dissolvable insofar as political parties fa-
cilitate the marriage of theory and practice
an aim that, some argued, could be achieved
if parties are democratically organized, facili-
tate self-criticism, and incorporate critics and
if they are deeply embedded in the working
classes (Marx & Engels 1848 [1978], Lenin
1902 [1999]; see also Luxemburg 19041918
[1961], Luk acs 1923 [1971], Gramsci 1929
1935 [1971]).
9
Making a strong distinction be-
tween progressive and regressive party forms,
Gramsci conceived of the former as a com-
plex element of society in which a collective
will has already been recognized and has to
some extent asserted itself in action (Gramsci
19291935 [1971], pp. 123, 129, 155). By wed-
ding representation and ideology, partly via or-
ganic intellectuals who helped to build the in-
tellectual and moral unity of the classes, the
progressive party could serve as a vehicle for
counter-hegemonic transformation (Gramsci
19291935 [1971], quoted in Anderson 1976b,
p. 19; but see Kandil 2011).
THE MODERN PERIOD: THE
RISE AND FALL OF THE
SOCIOLOGY OF PARTIES
During most of the 1960s, the social science
of parties remained a deeply sociological en-
terprise (Duverger 1951 [1954], Sartori 1969).
Mayhew (1974, p. 1), for instance, describes
legislative work in political science as having
8
Born in Cologne, Michels had been a member of the
German Social Democratic Party until 1907, before emigrat-
ing to Italy and becoming known as an elite theorist alongside
Mosca and Pareto (Hands 1971, p. 157; see also Mosca 1896
[1960], Pareto 1902 [1991], Linz 2006). Ultimately he joined
the Italian Fascists.
9
Questions of party organization, representation, and polit-
ical action are subjects of intense debate in the Marxian tra-
dition, a full discussion of which is impossible here.
a dominant sociological tone. Indeed, socio-
logical intuitions undergirded the ideas of the
most accomplished students of American pol-
itics in political science. Among them were
Key (1942 [1964]), Sorauf (1964), and Elder-
sveld (1964), who understood parties as broad,
umbrella-like organizations formed as coali-
tions of many and diverse groups (Aldrich
1995, pp. 7, 8). Parties were widely seen as
having come into existence in order to resolve
the basic representational dilemma of articu-
lating and aggregating otherwise disparate in-
terests, so that electoral majorities could be
welded together and countries could be gov-
erned (Aldrich 1995, pp. 910). Parties were
also understood as multileveled and internally
diverse (Eldersveld 1964, cited by Aldrich 1995,
p. 10). Key famously distinguished between the
party-in-the-electorate, party activists, a
party-in-the legislature, and a party-in-the-
government (Key 1942 [1958], pp. 18182).
10
But perhaps the most central gure in post-
war research on parties was Seymour Martin
Lipset, whose inuence spanned bothsociology
and political science. Lipset drew on several
strands of classical thinking to develop a soci-
ological approach to parties and party systems
that extended the electoral sociology of Paul
Lazarsfeld and his Columbia colleagues (Manza
& Brooks 1999, pp. 1315).
11
In their seminal
collaboration, Lipset and Rokkan dened par-
ties as alliances in conicts over policies and value
10
We should also mention that the somewhat older ideas of
Schattschneider (1942) about party politics also had a strik-
ingly sociological character. Schattschneider (1942) saw or-
ganized interests and pressure groups as a major force in po-
litical life, and he saw strong political parties as perhaps the
only viable democratic counterweight to their inuence.
11
The sociological approach to parties and party systems, on
which this article focuses, should be distinguished from the
sociological approach to voting behavior. They are analyt-
ically related, and their intellectual fortunes are somewhat
intertwined, but the former sees the party as the main ob-
ject of analysis, whereas the latter sees the individual as the
main object of analysis. For a review of postwar research on
voting behavior, including the Columbia Schools electoral
sociology and the Michigan Schools social-psychological ap-
proach, which eventually gave rise to behavioralismin Amer-
ican politics research, see Manza & Brooks (1999, pp. 1314)
and De Leon (2014).
14.6 Mudge
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commitments within the larger body politic (Lipset
& Rokkan 1967, p. 5). A key source of conict
was class cleavage, which Lipset understood
primarily in terms of income and occupational
hierarchy. He argued that political parties
particularly in European countries, but also in
the American two-party contexttended to be
based on either the lower classes or the middle
and upper classes and, as such, represented
a democratic translation of class struggle
(Lipset 1960 [1981], pp. 230, 303331,
460). Despite the centrality of Marxian insights
in Lipsets work,
12
an emphasis on nonclass
cleavages also lent it a decidedly Weberian
tone: Party struggle was class struggle, but
nonclass social cleavages such as religious be-
lief, ethnic identity, and regional ties were also
expressed in party conict. In fact, according
to Lipset & Rokkan, whether a European party
system came to feature a strong working-class
movement depended on howa sequence of suc-
cessive conictsrst between the center and
periphery, then state and church, and nally
land and industrywere resolved by the time
universal manhood suffrage was introduced
(Lipset & Rokkan 1967, pp. 38, 48). This
process of cleavage-based party development
nally ended in the early twentieth century,
when there was a freezing of the major party
alternatives (Lipset & Rokkan 1967, p. 50).
Despite its inuence and prominence, the
full breadth and richness of Lipsets analyti-
cal vision gradually receded, though his ba-
sic intuitions remained somewhat inuential in
comparative politics. This change of fortune
is partly attributable to the larger demise of
the Parsonsian paradigm, which formed a key
part of his analysis (Lipset & Rokkan 1967,
pp. 626).
13
But other aspects of his analysis
12
Lipset eschewed the eschatological vision of the Marxian
tradition but nevertheless described his political sociology as
an apolitical Marxist analysis, absent Marxs conclusion
that socialism is an inevitable or preferable successor to cap-
italism (Lipset 1960 [1981], p. 459).
13
For instance, Lipset & Rokkan placed cleavages in a two-
dimensional political space using Parsons AGIL paradigm
(Lipset & Rokkan 1967, pp. 95, 101, 11214). See Mair 1997
[2004] for a useful discussion of Lipset & Rokkan; see Alford
also faded fromview, ranging fromhis stress on
timing and sequencing to his emphasis on the
importance of the instrumental and represen-
tative functions of parties, whichcanforce the
spokesmen for many contrasting interests and
outlooks to strike bargains, to stagger demands,
and to aggregate pressures (Lipset & Rokkan
1967, pp. 5, 93; Boix 2007, p. 505, has made a
similar observation). In many quarters of soci-
ology and political science, what remained of
the sociological approach to parties was the no-
tion that parties were the political creatures of
social groups.
14
Even this eventually gave way in the study of
American politics to a relatively asociological
paradigm built principally on the work of
economist Anthony Downs (1957) (see Aldrich
1995, pp. 1213). In the Downsian paradigm,
parties were understood not as instruments
of group struggle but as a team of politicians
whose paramount goal is to win elective ofce
(Bawn et al. 2012, p. 571). As Downs wrote,
parties do not seek to gain ofce in order to
carry out certain preconceived policies or to
serve any particular interest groups; rather they
formulate policies and serve interest groups
in order to gain ofce (Downs 1957, p. 137).
Central to this view of parties was the rational,
self-interested behavior of election-minded
politicians, especially legislators (see Mayhew
1974; Cox & McCubbins 1993, 2005). There
were important alternatives to this approach,
including a literature on party systems and
electoral realignments (Key 1955, Burnham
1970, Sundquist 1973; for an important
critique, see Mayhew 2002) and Fergusons
& Friedland (1974) and De Leon et al. (2009) for a critique.
See also De Leon (2014).
14
Worth mentioning here is the sidelining of a largely
European, interdisciplinary scholarship that considered the
strengths and weaknesses of single-party, two-party, and
multi-party alternatives, the forces that tendtoproduce them,
and the effects of the mass party form(Duverger 1951 [1954];
Almond 1956; Blondel 1968; Lijphart 1969; Rokkan 1970;
Sartori 1968, 1976; see Mair 1990, 1997 [2004] for a discus-
sion). Maurice Duverger, the French sociologist who articu-
lated Duvergers law (that majoritarian voting will tend to
produce a two-party system), is a foundational gure here.
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investment theory of party competition,
which conceptualized parties as blocs of major
investors who coalesce to advance candidates repre-
senting their interests (Ferguson 1995, p. 27; see
also Ferguson 1983, Ferguson & Rogers 1986).
Yet major tenets of the Downsian paradigm
became highly inuential in the literature
on parties, epitomized by Aldrichs rational
choice argument that electorally ambitious
legislators create parties to solve a range of
collective action and social choice problems
(Aldrich 1995, pp. 2950).
15
In the meantime, the sociology of parties
itself experienced a marked decline in the 1970s
and 1980s, apparently a combined effect of
epistemological doubt and a turn to nonparty
political phenomenaespecially states, state
building, and social movements (e.g., Piven &
Cloward 1977, Skocpol 1979, McAdam 1982,
Evans et al. 1985, Tilly 1985; but see Knoke
1972, 1973 for exceptions). The turn away
from the sociology of parties was accompanied
by an apparent decline of parties themselves.
Dahl, for instance, noted the expansion of
nonmajoritarian policy making, attributing it
to growing executive powers and the eclipse
of elected bodies by employer, union, and
interest group bargaining (Dahl 1966, p. 396;
LaPalombara & Weiner 1966; Epstein 1967;
DiSalvo 2012). Echoing Michelsian-Weberian
predictions, Kirchheimer identied the rise
of the catch-all party, characterized by a
prioritization of general electoral appeal over
the intellectual and moral encadrement of the
masses (Kirchheimer 1966, pp. 184, 190).
Others argued that the class basis of older
electoral coalitions was beginning to decay
and the traditional social group bases of
political behavior and party coalitions were
15
Notably, Aldrich (1995, p. 21) does not argue that politi-
cians are single-mindedintheir motivationtoobtainor retain
ofce. Moreover, there is a signicant strand of the so-called
rational choice literature built onthe notionthat politicians
are motivated not by electoral goals but by policy goals (e.g.,
Krehbiel 1993, 1998). For a helpful review of the literature
and a careful elaboration of a model that takes the idea of
multiple (and sometimes conicting) motivations seriously,
see Smith (2007).
breaking down, displaced by postmaterialist
values, nonclass party appeals, and new voting
(and nonvoting) tendencies (Manza & Brooks
1999, p. 2; see also Inglehart 1977, Przeworski
1980, Przeworski & Sprague 1986, Rose &
McAllister 1986, Franklin et al. 1992, Dalton
& Wattenberg 2000). Its central object called
into question, the sociology of parties appeared
to be nearing a total eclipse.
RENEWALS
The period since the 1990s brought signs of the
return of a full-edged sociology of parties. So-
ciologists and political scientists produced new
analyses that cast parties as causal forces in his-
torical change, as effects of other processes, and
as important in themselves. In the process, they
have resuscitated the breadth of the classical so-
ciology of parties and updated it theoretically
and methodologically.
The Return of the Sociological
Approach?
An early marker of the return of the sociol-
ogy of parties was work by Hout, Manza, and
Brooks that systematically revisited the soci-
ological approach to political behavior (Hout
et al. 1995, Manza et al. 1995, Manza & Brooks
1999). Analyzing data from the National Elec-
tion Survey on such individual-level variables as
vote choice, voter turnout, and party identica-
tion, they reassertedthe signicance of class and
other social cleavages as a basis of partisan pol-
itics, and they updated understandings of how
group-based partisan alignments had changed
over time. Around the same time, Schwartz
(1990, 1994) called for a view of the political
party as a network of relations, signaling a
new sociological push for thinking about par-
ties in more exible ways. These works signaled
that it was high time for a revitalized sociology
of parties.
A sociological turn of sorts also occurred in
the last decade or so among students of Amer-
ican politics in political science, partly in re-
sponse to ndings that are difcult to reconcile
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with the disciplines standard view of parties
(see Ansolabehere et al. 2001, Canes-Wrone
et al. 2002, Masket 2009, Carson et al. 2010,
cited in Bawn et al. 2012). At the forefront is the
work of the so-called UCLAschool, led by John
R. Zaller and collaborators (Cohen 2005, Bawn
& Noel 2007, Cohen et al. 2008, Karol 2009,
Masket 2009, Bawn et al. 2012, Baylor 2012).
In a recent paper, Zaller and colleagues clearly
lay out the basic elements of the new approach
(Bawn et al. 2012), building on The Party De-
cides (Cohenet al. 2008). The core idea, strongly
resonant with the sociological approach, is that
parties do not emerge because of the rational,
self-interested behavior of teams of politicians
seeking to win elections, but rather because or-
ganized groups of policy demanders seek spe-
cial benets by nominating and electing can-
didates amenable to their policy preferences
(Bawn et al. 2012, pp. 57475). Pointing to
cases such as the Southern planters and North-
ern mercantilists of the Federalist Party during
the late-eighteenth century and the collection
of civil rights organizations, labor unions, and
religious and civic groups that formed the back-
bone of liberalismwithin the Democratic Party
starting in the 1940s, researchers in the mold of
the UCLA school see interest-based groups
as the rst movers of the political process, and
their motivations and actions are understood
as setting partisan politics in motion and push-
ing partisan politics along (Bawn et al. 2012,
pp. 579, 581).
The explanatory value of the group-based
approach is apparent in recent work on parti-
san change. Except in the case of groupless
issues, Karol (2009, p. 9) nds that shifts in the
policy positions of the two major parties can
usually be attributed to shifts in preferences
among groups already in their coalition or party
elites attempts to attract a new group to their
side. Interest-based groups play a key role in
this process of coalition management by ini-
tiating or accelerating partisan change as well
as inducing or constraining the repositioning
of politicians (Karol 2009). Schickler and col-
leagues (2010, p. 682) nd parallel evidence that
the Democratic Partys core coalition partners
were instrumental in transforming the party
to embrace civil rights (see also Feinstein &
Schickler 2008). The national party changed in
response not to strategic choices of party lead-
ers (e.g., Carmines & Stimson 1989), but to
the demands of groups like the Urban League,
Congress of Industrial Organizations, Ameri-
canJewishCongress, and Americans for Demo-
cratic Action (Schickler et al. 2010, p. 686).
The approach is also gaining traction in
research on representational inequality. In a
statistical analysis of a unique data set on
policy responsiveness, Gilens (2012, p. 163)
nds that parties act more like the agents of
policy demanders than instruments of of-
ce seekers, responding to the preferences of
the public. . .when necessary but pursuing their
own policy agendas when they can. He argues
that policy is broadly representative of pub-
lic preferences only when there is a change in
partisan regime or when there is a presidential
election coming up. Otherwise, policy is largely
driven by [a]ctivist groups, major donors, and
interest organizers. Thus, most of the time,
upwardly distributive policies are put into
place when Republicans dominate, while poli-
cies that redistribute resources tothe less advan-
taged are established when Democrats con-
trol Congress and the White House (Gilens
2012, p. 191).
This partisan pattern points to a second
sense in which research on parties by students
of American politics is taking a sociological
turn. Agrowing number of studies nowsupport
the conclusion that the two parties are tied to
different social classeswith important conse-
quences for representation, policy making, and
economic inequality. Bartels (2008, pp. 2963)
shows that the real income of the middle class
and the working poor has increased much
more quickly under Democratic presidents.
His analysis of policy making across a number
of issues indicates that the roll call votes of US
senators is strongly predicted by the opinion
of afuent constituents and the party of the
legislator (important early studies of inequality
in political representation include Gilens 2005
and Jacobs & Page 2005). More striking still,
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Republicans appear far less responsive to their
low- and middle-income constituents and far
more responsive to the opinion of their afuent
constituents than do Democrats, who appear
equally responsive to middle- and upper-
income constituents (Bartels 2008, pp. 252
82).
If it is true that Republicans are most
responsive to the opinions of afuent con-
stituents (Bartels 2008, pp. 25282), and if it
is also true that afuent Americans tend to op-
pose a higher minimum wage, more gener-
ous unemployment benets, stricter corporate
regulation. . .and a more progressive personal
tax regime to a greater degree than less af-
uent Americans (Gilens 2012, p. 117), then it
is not much of a mystery why the adoption of
upwardly redistributive policies (Gilens 2012,
p. 191) andthus stronger income growthamong
the afuent than the less afuent (Bartels 2008,
pp. 33, 56) tends to occur under Republican
control of government. Republicans listen most
closely to their afuent constituents, whose up-
wardly redistributive preferences they follow
when in ofce (and whose preferences they per-
haps share). At the same time, there should be
little mystery why afuent voters today tend to
identify as Republicans and vote for Republi-
can candidates (McCarty et al. 2006, pp. 74,
8485, 96). The afuent do better under the
GOP than the alternative. Neither conclusion
would have seemed out of place among scholars
working in certain mid-century traditions of re-
search on parties. Notwithstanding the sugges-
tive nding fromVerba et al. (1995) on the role
of campaigncontributions, perhaps the only en-
during mystery is why Republicans would lis-
ten to the afuent more closely than they lis-
ten to other Americans and more closely than
Democrats listen to the afuent (Bartels 2008,
pp. 270, 280).
There is also growing evidence that the
parties are tied differently to politically active
groups. Drawing on Ferguson (1983), Fergu-
son &Rogers (1986), and Vogel (1989), Hacker
& Pierson (2010) argue that todays massive
degree of economic inequality is due largely to
the remobilization of organized business in the
1970s. Yet business would eventually establish
different nancial connections with Democrats
than it did with Republicans. Financing the
GOP was an investment, write Hacker &
Pierson (2010, p. 179), helping the party
shape a policy agenda and elect the right
candidates. It was a form of insurance in the
case of Democrats, where it went to remove
potential obstacles and encourage defection
from the party line (Hacker & Pierson 2010,
p. 180). Money to Republicans often went
to the party, whereas for Democrats it went
to individual candidates (Hacker & Pierson
2010, p. 180). The result was the radicalization
and revitalization of the GOP, a weakening of
Democratic solidarity and resolve, and a host of
policy changes that have fueled the rise of eco-
nomic inequality. In arguing that [p]owerful
groups are behind the partisan politics of the
winner-take-all economyand here they
have in mind business coalitions, Wall Street
lobbyists, medical industry playersHacker
& Pierson (2010, p. 291) are harkening back to
earlier, more sociologically minded traditions
of thought about parties, traditions that call
to mind Key and Lipset rather than Downs.
Unsurprisingly, some political scientists have
called for a reengagement with sociologically
inected theories of political economy (e.g.,
Jacobs & Soss 2010).
Engaging with these emergent political sci-
ence literatures, sociologists have also taken on
questions of inequality and representation in
American politics. Juxtaposing the pluralist no-
tion of American society as one of multiple
and overlapping lines of disagreement with
polarization in the form of interest alignment
(constraint), Baldassarri & Gelman (2008) ana-
lyzed patterns in the evolution of opinion cor-
relations within years, in various issue domains,
using the National Elections Studies (1972
2004). They argue that party polarization is
driving the ideological sorting of individuals in
the United States, rather than the other way
around. Pointing out that groups that exhibit
the most constraint are the wealthiest 33% of
Americans and (especially Republican) activists,
they argue that activists and parties are locked
14.10 Mudge
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in a self-reinforcing cycle of polarization, even
as the wealthiest classwhich knows what it
wants, and is likely, now more than in the past,
to affect the political processexerts undue
inuence, marginalizing poorer groups and the
nonactivist public (Baldassarri &Gelman 2008,
pp. 409, 442; see also Baldassarri & Bearman
2007, Baldassarri 2011).
Other sociologists have considered the par-
tisan effects of representational exclusion by
looking to a specic American population: dis-
enfranchised felons. Uggen &Manza (2002) ar-
gue that the exponential increase in American
incarceration rates in the late twentieth cen-
tury (see alsoSutton2004, Pager 2007, Western
2007)viewed by Wacquant (2008, 2012) as an
integral feature of the neoliberal eraand the
distinctly American practice of felon disenfran-
chisement have tilted electoral outcomes in a
pro-Republican direction. Estimating the likely
voting patterns of disenfranchised felons, they
argue that, without felon disenfranchisement,
Democrats would have controlled the Senate
since 1986; they also present evidence that, if
year 2000 levels of incarceration had obtained
in the 1960s and 1970s, neither Kennedy nor
Carter would have won the presidency (but see
Burch 2012).
Remarrying Parties to States
and Society
Sociologists of social movements, meanwhile,
have refocused attention on society-party ties
by rethinking a tendency in social movement
scholarship to frame movements and parties
as mutually exclusive modes of political action
(e.g., Gamson 1975 [1990], Tilly 1978, Jenkins
& Klandermans 1995). This effort has involved
(re)imagining parties, movements, and states
as dynamically interconnected, examining how
movements and parties may become more
or less permanently joined, and considering
parties as channels through which social move-
ments affect policies and states (Goldstone
2003b; McAdam et al. 2001, 2008; Amenta
et al. 2010). Goldstone (2004, pp. 33637) in
particular argues that this is a necessary move,
given that recent waves of democratization
have shown that social movement activity
is. . .a complementary mode of political action
to party-based activity. Parties should thus
be understood as essential elements of the
relational elds that condition movements
emergence, growth, actions, and successes or
failures (Goldstone 2004, pp. 33637; see also
Van Dyke 2003).
Social movement scholars note that the
shaping or reshaping of parties is among
[t]he main potential political consequences
of movements at the structural level, marking
the achievement of lasting inuence and
the possibility of collective benets (Amenta
et al. 2010, pp. 289, 292). Examples include,
for instance, the historical development of
mid-nineteenth-century French republicanism
from a movement into a party (Aminzade
1993, p. 19), recent events in non-Western
countries where citizenship rights and polit-
ical party systems are developing out of social
movements (Goldstone 2003a, p. 3), and the
rise of conservative, populist, and radical right
parties in Canada and Western Europe (Betz
& Immerfall 1998, Schwartz 2000, Rydgren
2007). The signicance of movement-party ties
in terms of collective benets is perhaps most
obvious in the case of left party formation out of
workers organizations, which fundamentally
shaped Western political landscapes in the
twentieth century (Sassoon 1996, Eley 2002).
16
For this reason, parties actually remained a
going concern in welfare states literatures
even as social scientists otherwise lost interest:
Adherents of the power-resources perspective
present strong evidence that left partiesbeing
linked up with organized labor and structurally
disadvantaged groupstend to push policy in a
more progressive, redistributive, and universal-
istic direction, albeit with important national
and historical variations (Stephens 1979; Korpi
1978, 2003, 2006; Korpi &Shalev 1980; Huber
16
The literature on labor, left parties, and social democracy
is vast and overlaps with Marxist theoretical scholarshipan
expression, arguably, of the particular concern with parties
as a nexus of theory and practice in the Marxian tradition.
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et al. 1993; Hicks 1999; Huber & Stephens
2001; Korpi & Palme 2003; Bradley et al. 2003;
Brady 2003; cf. Boix 1997). Others contend that
the absence of successful labor-to-party forma-
tion in the United States, meanwhile, is key to
understanding the American welfare state and
US political development more generally (Voss
1993, Lipset & Marks 2001, Archer 2008;
cf. Sombart 1906 [1976]). By extension, the
late-twentieth-century weakening of union-
party ties is broadly understood as a historical
divorce of left parties from their movement
foundations (Ebbinghaus 1995, 2003; Howell
2001; Voss 2010; cf. Kitschelt 1993).
Others are now looking beyond the labor
movement to consider the nature and conse-
quences of movement-party ties. Based on an
analysis of the US antiwar movement using
survey and ethnographic evidence, Heaney &
Rojas (2007) argue that membership overlap
between movements and parties can effectively
create a party-in-the-street: a network of
activists and organizations that simultaneously
maintain loyalty to and involvement with a
major political party and a social movement
(p. 453; see also Heaney & Rojas 2015).
While the movement-party relationship may
come and go as movements mobilize around
particular issues or elections, movements
may also power electoral realignments or
invent new modes of contention for parties to
appropriate. Schwartz (2006) focuses on small
parties in the United States and Canada as
party movements, which have characteristics
of both movements and parties, and manage
to remain surprisingly resilient in the face
of organizational obstacles. At the extreme,
McAdam & Tarrow (2010) have argued that
movement-party-state interpenetration may
be so thorough as to effectively constitute
a movement statethat is, states that are
interpenetrated with movements via parties.
Among the most important party-related
outcomes, of course, is the stabilization of party
systems (cf. Goldstone 2011). As in the present-
day Middle East, newly formed party systems
invariably confront a host of issues that threaten
to undo them, ranging from disputes over scal
and legal authority and foreign policy to mil-
itary power and external conict (Goldstone
2011, pp. 14, 16). McLean (2011, p. 90), in
contrast, considers the question of stabilization
in the case of eighteenth-century Poland, ask-
ing how chaotic, factionalized, pathologically
patrimonial politics transitioned into a po-
litically stable outcome based not on tyranny,
but on the operation of parties. Taking aim
at rational choice models, he argues that tran-
sitions from factions to party systems cannot
be modeled according to the rational choices
of interest-seeking elites because interests are
products of social organization and the roles
therein (McLean 2011, p. 91). Instead, he ar-
gues, the analytical focus should center on
how the conguration of social networks pro-
duces social roles, and thus political identities.
McLean (2011, p. 91) contends that, in Poland,
a rewiring of highly politicized elite marriage
networks. . .claried the loyalties of key partic-
ipants and made the constitutional agreement
of 1791 possible, cementing the Polish party
system.
Other analyses recall the Weberian theme
of party formation and state building as par-
allel processes, with emphasis on sequencing
and path dependence. A classic work here is
Skowroneks (1982) study of American state
building between 1877 and 1920, when the
American state was transformed froma state of
courts and parties, unable to meet the widen-
ing social and economic demands of the age
to an administrative state of national scope and
capabilities (pp. 3940). Among other things,
Skowronek identied an important difference
in state-party dynamics in Europe versus the
United States. At the same time that European
parties were challengingthe political hegemony
of national states, American government of-
cials were challenging the hegemony of po-
litical parties (Skowronek 1982, pp. 12, 41).
More recently, Slez & Martin (2007) analyze
the origins of the American party system in
the rst place, using multidimensional scal-
ing techniques to show how the alliances that
would come to characterize the rst American
party system emerged through the timing and
14.12 Mudge
Chen
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sequencing of votes at that seminal state-
building event, the Constitutional Convention
of 1787. As in McLeans analysis, interests are
emergent, not given: Delegations interpreted
their interests in a path-dependent manner de-
pending on how previous questions were de-
cided, such that alignments emerged as a result
of the interdependent moves of different play-
ers over time (Slez & Martin 2007, p. 43).
Another example of time-sensitive analy-
sis dealing with parties and state building is
Riley & Desais (2007) macrosociological anal-
ysis of passive revolutions, in which they track
political processes from movements, to parties,
to states in Italy and India. They note that a
weak old regime and a period of working
class and peasant insurgency in both countries
prompted elites to support a mass party that
sought to modernize the country while pre-
serving the basic distribution of property and
much of the preexisting state (Riley & Desai
2007, pp. 83839). Given this backdrop, why
did Italy follow a path of violent fascism via the
Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF), whereas India
turned to the nonviolent, antifascist Congress
Party? The difference, Riley &Desai argue, can
be explained in part by the timing of the threat
fromthe left relative to national unication: In
unied Italy, on the one hand, a turn to fascism
occurred due to mobilization frombelow, fu-
eled by a dense web of cooperatives and mutual
aid societies; during Indias struggle for nation-
hood, on the other hand, British colonialism
gave Indian elites in the Congress Party a tar-
get against which to mobilize and thus a means
to co-opt popular unrest (Riley 2005, pp. 298
301; Riley & Desai 2007, pp. 83940).
Other work moves in a different direction
from state, to movement, to partyshowing
howthe structure of political institutions shapes
social movements, whose agendas are then in-
corporated into those of national parties. In
Martins (2008) analysis of how tax policy leapt
out of relative obscurity to become a recurring
ash point of partisan contention in the United
States, the interplay of movements and the state
is central. Martin shows, rst, that administra-
tive attempts to modernize tax collection in the
1960s and 1970s generated a variety of antitax
movements in states all across the country, but
the reforms they championed spanned the ide-
ological spectrumand had not yet found a regu-
lar home in either party. Acrucial turning point
came with the passage of Californias Proposi-
tion 13 in 1978, which gave the most conserva-
tive approach to tax relief (i.e., property tax lim-
itation) the imprimatur of popular legitimacy
and captured the imagination of key Republi-
cans. Among them was Ronald Reagan, who
embraced a new antitax philosophy when it be-
came clear that Proposition 13 had not imme-
diately destroyed Californias public nances.
Other policy-oriented work highlights the
party-state nexus with a focus on explaining
policy outcomes. In his account of race-based
afrmative action in employment, Chen
(2007, 2009) nds, among other things, that
Republican control of veto points in the
states and Republican control over the balance
of power in Congress contributed to the slow
spread of strong fair employment practice laws,
thereby creating a regulatory vacuum that led
(ironically) to the advent of afrmative action.
Amenta & Halfmann (2000), meanwhile,
call for an institutional politics theory of
social policy places, refreshing emphasis on
party organization to understand state-level
variation in the regulation and operation of
the Works Progress Administration during the
New Deal. Reminiscent of power-resources
research, they nd evidence that the patronage-
oriented parties and left-party regimes in state
politics are correlated with political support
for more generous wage policies and levels
(Amenta & Halfmann 2000). Last but not least,
Halfmanns (2011) comparative analysis of
abortion politics and policy in Britain, Canada,
and the United States nds that abortion
became a main object of contention in party
politics after the long 1960s because Ameri-
can parties were more open to new movements
than parties in [the two] other countries
(Halfmann 2011, p. 132). This difference,
in turn, was an effect of party organization,
stemming from the fact that decisions about
candidate nominations, party leadership, and
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party platforms are all governed by rules that
admit to a higher degree of input from below
in the United States compared with Britain or
Canada.
Looking beyond North America and
Britain, in the 1990s a resurgent literature
on parties by European political compar-
ativists raised the question of Western
European parties cartelization, advancing a
Michelsian-Weberian argument that parties
have abandoned civil society ties by profes-
sionalizing, bureaucratizing, and converging
with states: By invading and marrying them-
selves to the state via new rules and nancial
practices, Western parties have cartelized,
growing increasingly disconnected from civil
society and exhibiting a pattern of interparty
collusion (Mair 1997 [2004], p. 108; Katz &
Mair 2009). Citing a valuable collection of
otherwise scattered data on parties internal
organization, memberships, and nancial de-
pendencies (focusing especially on state-based,
rather than member-based, fundingor sub-
vention), European comparativists argue that
cartelization is widespread and has fostered
a professionalized, capital-intensive politics
that is contained and managed by party elites
(Katz & Mair 1995, 2009; Mair 1997 [2004],
Bartolini & Mair 2001; Biezen & Kopecky
2007). A related literature on depoliticization
identies a general downgrading of politics
itself, where good governance amounts to some
combination of legal, interest-group, and ex-
pert rule with minimal interference by political
elites (Burnham 2001; Mair 2006, 2008).
The revival of Weberian themes of par-
ties ties to states (and through those ties, par-
ties policy effects) is matched by a revival of
distinctively Marxian emphases on how par-
ties act back on societyin particular, the hard
Gramscian stance that parties actively articu-
late politically consequential social groups, and
not vice versa. Leading gures are Cedric De
Leon, Manali Desai, and Cihan Tu gal, who
draw from Gramsci, Althusser, and Laclau to
emphasize the process through which party
practices naturalize class, ethnic, and racial for-
mations as a basis of social division by integrat-
ing disparate interests and identities into coher-
ent sociopolitical blocs (De Leon et al. 2009,
pp. 19495).
Analyses of political development inTurkey,
the United States, and India put the artic-
ulation perspective to work (for a compari-
son of class politics in the United States and
Canada along these lines, see Eidlin 2012).
Tu gals (2007) study of contemporary Turk-
ish politicsbased on multisite ethnography
of Sultanbeyli, a poor, conservative suburb on
the eastern edge of metropolitan Istanbul
tracks how the activities and strategies of the
center-right Turkish Justice and Development
Party fostered the rise of a partially secularized
form of moderate Islamism by appropriating
Islamist strategies and putting them to the
use of non-Islamist causes (Tu gal 2007, p. 8).
De Leons (2008) novel analysis of the
American Civil War also situates party-led
articulation as a leading cause of politi-
cal transformations. Engaging with Moores
(1966) account of the Civil War as a
bourgeois revolution (no bourgeoisie, no
democracy), De Leon investigates histori-
cal alignments between antebellum Midwest-
ern farmers and segments of the working
class with formerly Whig-sympathetic, anti-
Southern, urban industrial elites behind the
Republican Party. De Leon argues that a splin-
tering of the party system combined with the
Republican Partys critique of dependency
under slavery and thereby radically dimin-
ished once potent class distinctions that placed
industrialists, nanciers, and their sweated
hirelings at odds with farmers and indepen-
dent artisans (De Leon 2008, p. 66). Republi-
cans were thus able to form a mass coalition in
support of liberal capitalist democracy between
1854 and 1857, eventually leading to the Amer-
ican Civil War and the overthrow of Southern
planters. Last but not least, Desais (2002, 2003,
2007) comparative work on Kerala and West
Bengal, India, places parties and their relative
autonomy at the center of welfare state de-
velopment, explaining Keralas more extensive
social and antipoverty policies in terms of left
parties strategies and tactics. The left party
14.14 Mudge
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in West Bengal, which lacked a coherent bloc
of leaders with experience in organizing mass
movements, came to power later, with lead-
ers who were far more isolated from popular
movements, leading it to focus rst on secur-
ing political power and less on social reform
(Desai 2003, p. 170). Keralas left party leader-
ship, forged in the crucible of anticaste move-
ments earlier in the century, embraced the
nationalist Congress Party as early as 1934,
enabling it to attain power earlier on a tide of
popular support and putting it in a stronger po-
sition to concentrate on implementing a social
program rather than winning reelection.
Reviving a Notion of Parties as Social,
Cultural, and Institutional Forces
Recent works inthe articulationschool do more
than counter unidirectional notions of parties
as expressions of social groups; parties here are
key agents in the production of shared mean-
ings and the construction of stable institutions.
Beyond the works just described, this is also
clear in De Leons (2010) analysis of discourse
as a means to the legitimation of mass party
competition in the United States, arguing that
by mobilizing a martial discourse after 1824,
American parties proactively legitimated their
own existence by endowing local party leaders
with a symbolic, militaristic role (as sentinels
or guardians), such that local elites could
carve out an identity for themselves in the
emerging mass party system (De Leon 2010,
pp. 136138). Others echo the articulation
schools concerns with how parties produce
shared political meaning, but they draw
from pragmatism and institutionalist lines of
thought. Alexander (2004, 2010), for instance,
mobilizes Goffman (among many others) in his
call for cultural pragmatics, arguing for a view
of party politics as a stream of decision and
meaning-making (Alexander 2010, p. 410).
Here parties are stage setters in struggles for
performative success, in which cultural
scripts achieve verisimilitude through effective
mise-en-sc` ene (Alexander 2004, p. 527). Jansen
(2007), meanwhile, introduces yet another
theoretical angle, drawing from institutionalist
notions of path dependence to add a distinc-
tively time-sensitive dimension to meaning-
making processes: Jansen uses a processual
model of memory work (path-dependent
memory work) to conceptualize how move-
ments use. . .historical symbolism to achieve
political ends in an analysis that focuses partly
on movement-party-state ties ( Jansen 2007,
p. 956). These latter works are notable, in par-
ticular, for their theoretically innovative ways of
emphasizing party politics as a deeply cultural,
symbolic, and performative set of processes that
shape and structure political communication.
Finally, intersecting literatures on neoliber-
alism, populism, and neopopulismnotable for
their interdisciplinarity and broad geographical
rangematchanemergent sensitivity toparties
and the production of shared meanings with
attention to their destabilization and reorga-
nization (Weyland 1996, 2003; Mudge 2008,
2011; Comaroff 2011).
17
Recalling Alexanders
interest in party politics as dramaturgy, schol-
arship on (neo)populism draws attention to
how large-scale economic and political trans-
formations (neoliberalism, European integra-
tion) have generated democratic exclusion and
alienation; altered the strategies of established
parties, giving rise to right-wing movement-
parties; and produced a new sort of political
theater in the process (Betz 1994, Holmes 2000,
Rydgren 2007, Berezin 2009, Comaroff 2011).
Comaroff (2011), for instance, argues that late
liberalism has produced a new, diversionary
politics that is organized around prot, the-
ater, and narcissism, encouraging party lead-
ers and followers to bypass the more cumber-
some apparatus of democratic consultation and
participatory governance in favor of theatri-
cal performances through mass media, leading
17
This is a large set of literatures, and so by necessity we dis-
cuss it in rather broad terms here. See Jansen (2011) for a
useful reviewof the literature on populism and neopopulism;
Mudge (2008) reviews neoliberalism literatures in a particu-
larly party-focused way (cf. Wacquant 2012). Neoliberalism
has also been a central emphasis of the articulation school
(e.g., Desai 2011; Tu gal 2009, 2012).
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to a form of populism that offers little hope
for sustained, critical political engagement
(Comaroff 2011, p. 105; on populism, cf. Jansen
2011). Whereas some strands of this scholar-
ship invoke Weberian themes of parties as bases
of charismatic leadership, particularly on the
right, others emphasize the professionalization
and closure of mainstream parties with em-
phasis on the left: Bourdieu, for instance, em-
phasizes the neoliberal period as one of the
professionalization of politics to an extreme,
in which mainstream parties produce issues,
programmes, analyses, commentaries, concepts
and events for citizens who are reduced to
the status of consumers and thus politically
dispossessed (Bourdieu 1991, pp. 172; see also
Bourdieu 2002 [2008]). Focusing on language
as the coin of the political realm, Bourdieu ar-
gues that dispossession is particularly problem-
atic for parties of the left: The further removed
a party politician is from the positions of those
representedsay, a poor community whose
members do not speak the qualied language of
professional politicsthe less their representa-
tive claims are reconcilable with the interests
of the politician. Mudge (2008) also calls atten-
tion to parties of the leftparticularly given the
rise of what she identies as a late-twentieth-
century neoliberal politics built on a market-
centric commonsense that is particularly anath-
ema to the lefts historical commitments.
OPENINGS FOR A RENEWED
SOCIOLOGY OF PARTIES
Reclaiming the breadth of the classical tradi-
tions and, in more than a few ways, moving be-
yond it, the renewed sociology of parties points
in exciting new directions. In this section we
focus, in particular, on six lines of inquiry that
a continued renewal of the sociology of parties
might fruitfully pursue: looking inside parties;
placing parties in politics; explaining intraparty
change and interparty change; identifying party
effects; embedding parties in time; and con-
sidering the importance of performance, sym-
bolism, and meaning making in party politics.
The rst four are well anchored in classical
traditionsalthough we suggest that looking
inside parties, in particular, deserves greater at-
tention. The last two, meanwhile, go beyond
the classical traditions, marking out important
areas for new investigations within what we
hope will be the continuing reclamation of the
party as a full-edged sociological object.
A rst line of inquiry, which is arguably
a prerequisite for all others, involves looking
inside parties more closely. This has perhaps
received the least attention in the renewed so-
ciology of parties. Although party organization
was a central consideration of the classical so-
ciology of parties, the new sociology of parties
has not engaged systematically with organi-
zational questions. Amenta (1998), Schwartz
(2006), Halfmann (2011), and European
comparativists associated with the cartel party
thesis (among others) do, however, point in
useful directions on this count. How are parties
organized and how is authority and power
allocated within them? Are parties top-down
organizations, more integrated with states than
with civil society, structured to preserve and
enhance the discretion of leaders and elites; or
are parties bottom-up organizations (move-
ment parties, to borrow Schwartzs term) that
admit to signicant inuence from activists
and the grassroots? What accounts for any
observable variation? How are party leaders
and activists selected and recruited? Howmuch
discipline, solidarity, and coordination does a
party exhibit, and how is it related to the way it
is organized? How do parties raise money and
spend it? How are different aspects of party
organization related to the degree of relative
autonomy (Desai 2002) that parties enjoy
from state and society? Many of these topics
remained largely within the purviewof political
scientists (e.g., Mayhew 1986; Shefter 1994;
Galvin 2010, 2012; Hacker & Pierson 2010),
who have made considerable headway. Yet it
seems to us that present-day students of parties
have a formidable range of tools for pursuing
such questions, including network analysis,
political ethnography, eld and institutional
theories, and the concepts and methods of
organizational sociology. These tools have, to
14.16 Mudge
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date, been more often trained on phenomena
around parties than on parties themselves.
A second area of inquiry might aim to place
parties in politicsto borrow and repurpose
Mayhews expression. How are parties embed-
ded in dynamic political interrelationships with
state and society? Where do parties t into the
larger political system? What seems especially
promising is the move toward analytical granu-
larity that many recent studies exhibit, treating
both state and societyand indeed parties
themselvesas differentiated entities that in-
teract over time in complex ways (cf. De Leon
2014). This type of approach is exemplied,
for instance, in Martins (2008) analysis of how
taxes became a ashpoint of partisan politics
an analysis that carves out a role for state and
local tax administration, antitax movements,
state-level policy-making institutions, and
public opinion. Placing parties in politics
will enable sociologists to generate more
compelling evidence that parties matter by dis-
tinguishing their inuence from that of other
individual and collective political actorsor,
alternatively, generating more compelling
evidence that parties matter precisely because
their boundaries overlap with other organiza-
tions, groups, and institutions. In a Weberian
mode, specic attention to the roles of party-
based professionalsconsultants, pollsters,
experts, and advisersseem especially to merit
attention (Weber 1919 [1958]; Bourdieu 1991,
2002 [2008]; for a notable recent work along
these lines, see Laurison 2013), taking parties
as sites of alliances and points of contact
between professional and political struggles
and tracking them both within and across
national boundaries (Abbott 2005, p. 253).
A third line of inquiry focuses on parties
as causal effects, namely, explaining intraparty
change and interparty change. Classical ques-
tions about party formation should remain high
on this agenda, but other questions are impor-
tant as well. Why do the policy commitments of
partiesevident in their party platformsshift
over time or remain the same? What explains
the emergence, nature, intensication, or de-
cline of intraparty factionalization? How does
factionalization relate to both types of party
change? What accounts for patterns of change
and continuity in the composition of party sup-
porters, at the level of interest groups as well
as of ordinary voters? What explains shifts in
the observable pattern of interparty conict and
competition? These questions have again been
treated largely by sociologically minded polit-
ical scientists (e.g., Burnham 1970, Kitschelt
1994, Karol 2009, DiSalvo 2012) and have long
been a focus in European comparative politics
(Budge et al. 2001, Klingemann et al. 2006),
but they merit attention from political sociol-
ogists as well. One especially intriguing possi-
bility is the not yet fully tapped opportunity to
explore the preferences, strategies, and political
capacities of the afuent and wealthy, as well as
various segments of organized business, tracing
their connections with different party factions
and in turn illuminating their impact on both
intraparty and interparty change.
A fourth line of inquiry centers on assessing
what parties do: What do parties, and factions
within them, set out to pursue, why, and to what
effect? The critical question here is less whether
parties matterwhich we take as a given in
democratic contextsthan how and why par-
ties matter. Under what conditions do they
largely mediate between more fundamental so-
cial or economic forces and political outcomes?
Under what conditions do parties serve as chan-
nels through which elites, the mass public, or
particular group-based constituencies achieve
their preferences and exert their will? Under
what conditions do parties exert their own, in-
dependent inuence?
One key to exploring this set of questions
is fully grappling with the role of public opin-
ion (e.g., Burstein 2010), which is only un-
evenly incorporated into the sociological liter-
ature on parties (Manza &Brooks 2012; but see
Baldassarri & Bearman 2007 and Baldassarri
& Gelman 2008); these concerns should, of
course, deal with public opinion as public
attitudesin their full complexity, across con-
texts, and over time, maintaining an aware-
ness of how parties themselves drive polling
technologies, as well as their representational
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consequences (Manza & Brooks 2012, p. 106;
cf. Bourdieu 2002 [2008]). Another key is de-
voting further thought to the role of partisan
elites. Scholars as strikingly diverse in their
intellectual commitments as De Leon et al.
(2009) and Carmines & Stimson (1989) carve
out a central place in their analysis for parti-
san elites, which are seen as important, top-
down sources of political change. This view
contrasts with the view of Manza & Brooks
(1999), Lee (2002), Karol (2009), and Schick-
ler (Feinstein & Schickler 2008; Schickler et al.
2010), who stress the limits or constraints that
partisan elites face, arguing for the impor-
tance of bottom-up forces such as social move-
ments or interest groups. At the same time,
recent work that eschews a bottom-up ver-
sus top-down dichotomy altogetherlinking
Schwartzs call for a network perspective
on the party with classical sociological em-
phases on their cleavage bases, showcasing the
potential of network analysis in the process
(e.g., Parigi &Sartori 2014)presents the pos-
sibility of a new, more synthetic perspective.
A fth area of inquiry may be seen as
part of a broader effort to embed politics in
time (Pierson 2004). Temporal processes
and specically ideas about the importance
of sequencingwere put to good analyti-
cal use in the modern sociology of par-
ties (e.g., Lipset & Rokkan 1967) and now
take center stage in the renewed scholarship
as well (e.g., Baldassarri &Bearman 2007, Riley
& Desai 2007, Slez & Martin 2007, Baldassarri
& Gelman 2008, Baldassarri 2011). We think
it is enormously promising for political soci-
ologists to continue thinking about parties in
time as they explore how parties t into the
analysis of performative practices in party poli-
tics, political identity formation, the decline and
transformation of parties, and a range of other
political outcomes.
Sixth and nally, there is a turn toward
meaning making that suggests promising pos-
sibilities for a distinctively practice-oriented,
cultural sociology of parties. Pursued in
particular by the articulation school and in
recent work on neoliberalism and populism,
these concerns remain largely immanent in the
renewed sociology of parties. How do political
parties and cultural production intersect, and
how do these intersections shape civic culture,
political engagement or alienation, or how
voters relate to particular parties or candidates?
How do parties produce, shape, and reshape
shared meanings over time, how do they
use symbols and cultural products to achieve
political ends, and how do macrohistorical and
macroeconomic conditions shape these pro-
cesses? An attentiveness to the dramaturgical,
symbolic, emotive, and performative aspects of
party politics is key to addressing these sorts of
questions. Similarly important is the analytical
incorporation of media structures, which
remain at best peripheral concerns in the soci-
ology of parties both old and new, despite the
centrality of media and communication tech-
nologies in both established party politics and
in recent movements such as Occupy and the
Arab Spring. The scholarship on neoliberalism
and (neo)populism also offers interesting ways
of linking macro-level structural change (ne-
oliberal deregulatory processes, globalization,
European political and economic integration)
to both the organization and strategies of par-
ties and party leadership and the roles of prac-
tice, symbolism, and emotion in party politics.
On a nal note that cross-cuts all the lines
of inquiry just discussed, we highlight that the
renewed sociology of parties epistemological,
analytical, and conceptual advances are com-
plemented by a deeply historical and broadly
international bent. This is only right, but it
calls for careful attention to the specication
of historical and contextual scope conditions in
order to avoid false universals and nonmutu-
ally exclusive claimsa tendency to which the
study of parties has succumbed in the past. If,
in some cases and time periods, parties have
emerged because of the self-interested behav-
iors of politicians, it need not be true that
they never emerge because of organized pol-
icy demanders; parties can be primarily expres-
sions of existing cleavages in some cases and
times and actively forge political blocs inothers;
they may also tend toward power seeking over
14.18 Mudge
Chen
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principle under certain historical and organi-
zational conditions but not others. As classi-
cal thinkers recognized, parties are not sta-
ble or developmentally unidirectional; they are
fraught with tensions, power struggles, and
conicting orientations. Careful theory build-
ing focused on the explicit identication of
scope conditions is thus paramount, particu-
larly as party scholarship continues to extend
its purview across the globe and back in
time.
The lines of inquiry and analytical strategies
we have suggested are far from exhaustive, but
we argue that they should be pursued if soci-
ologists wish to fully reengage with the broad-
ranging intuitions and insights that their disci-
plinary forebearers introduced into the study of
parties nearly a century ago.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The authors are not aware of any afliations, memberships, funding, or nancial holdings that
might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors thank Karen Cook, Cedric de Leon, Dan Galvin, Laurel Harbridge, Rob Jansen,
David Karol, Georgia Kernell, Adam Slez, Cihan Tu gal, audience members at Northwesterns
Political Parties Working Group, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful conversations and con-
structive feedback on earlier drafts. Special thanks are due to Phyllis Jeffrey for her assistance and
to Peter Mair for inspiration. Errors and omissions are, of course, our own.
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